LIVE ISSUE/METRO.

Metro's campaign is vital to its national expansion strategy.

It is hard to decide which is the bolder aspect of the new multimillion-pound campaign for Metro. Is it more surprising that a media owner should choose to develop a national TV and cinema drive aimed at advertisers, or that it should consider such a large-scale trade campaign for, of all things, a free morning newspaper?

Certainly, trade ads have made their way into the uncharted territories of mass consumer media before now. Earlier this year, OMD UK ran a spot flagging the importance of media strategy in the midst of Channel 4's programme on the "greatest ads of all time".

But that work pretty much defined the limits for a direct business-to-business appeal in the mass market -- event-specific, minutely targeted and with no long-term roll out.

The likelihood of a free publication breaking out of this trade marketing mould would have appeared laughable a few years ago. Conventional marketing wisdom states quite clearly that if you don't buy it, you don't read the ads.

There would have seemed very little chance of a trade campaign convincing advertisers otherwise. Certainly not enough chance to justify a spend that Mike Anderson, Metro's managing director, admits is "a few million pounds".

But Metro, as London now knows, is no ordinary free paper. Within its first 18 months, national circulation has rocketed to 800,000. Versions of the title are now available in Manchester, Birmingham and Edinburgh, with Naked, the New PHD offshoot, appointed to plan a separate media strategy for brand ...